The BBC reports that the owner of the website Surfthechannel.com has been sentenced to four years of jail. The website, which according to the BBC was one of the UK's most popular pirate sites, offered links to illegally copied TV shows and movies but did not host any of the files. The owner had been monitored by a private investigator hired by the UK anti-piracy organisation Fact and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). They made pictures of his house and computer equipment when they pretended to be interested in buying his house. Later the police raided his house and also arrested his wife who later wasn't found guilty.
According to the BBC, the owner of the site made about £35,000 in revenues every month, serving over 400k daily visitors. He had a limited company set up which sent earnings to a bank in Latvia. It wasn't an one-man operation, the owner hired others to source the material and to check if the links coming in actually worked. According to Fact and the MPAA the website was specifically created to make money from criminal activity and the sentence should send a clear message to others running similar websites.
Read more on this story at the BBC website.
